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drcagn writes "Ars Technica reports that Apple's new 1.1.3 firmware update unbricks iPhones damaged from unlocking and updating the firmware months ago. In September, users who hacked their iPhone's firmware to unlock it found their iPhone bricked when they updated to new firmware, creating a massive upset and internet furor. Although Apple claimed this was not an intended effect of the update, it held the stance that it is not their responsibility to ensure that updates work with users' warranty-voiding hacks, and many cried foul. This update, which provides new features Jobs showed off at Macworld, while not officially unbricking the iPhone, has restored iPhones from Gizmodo and a reader of the Unofficial Apple Weblog."

The phrase "brick" is so overused as to be meaningless these days. It wasn't "bricked"; the firmware update got fubared on the hacked phones the last time it was updated, rendering the device non-functional. This one overwrites whatever chunk of firmware code that was causing the issue, and poof, it fixes the problem.

Same as if you screwed up a BIOS update on your motherboard. Do it again, correctly and you'll be fine.

If this update could fix the iphones, putting it into recovery mode and doing a restore probably would have fixed it too. Anyone calling that bricked shouldnt be messing with their iphone in the first place.

I think people splitting hairs about the use of the term "brick" are missing the point.

Just as those who despair at peoplw calling the beige box a "hard drive" and the screen a "computer" are splitting hairs I suppose. This site has a high ratio of Moorlocks to Eloi so we object when one of the latter tries out technical slang to fit in and gets it wrong - that's why we're trying to eat you alive over such a mistake.

If the reference is being missed I am using Eloi in terms of a person that is only useful

Same as if you screwed up a BIOS update on your motherboard. Do it again, correctly and you'll be fine.

Do what again, boot into DOS and... oh wait, it doesn't boot, unless I take the chip out and flash it "correctly" in an entirely different device. It looks like the iPhone "works" as it turns on and does stuff ("in recovery mode"), so it's not really bricked. It just doesn't make calls.

Heh, I screwed up a BIOS flash one time... the machine wouldn't initialize the video at all after that. It took a few minutes of cold, hard panic to realize that "hrm, the floppy drive is lighting up". Did a bit of research on another machine, and found out that I could make a boot floppy to auto-flash the BIOS with proper firmware. There was an awful lot of swearing involved, however.Note to readers: When flashing BIOS firmware, pay careful attention to the *ENTIRE* revision string of your motherboard. An

In my case, the flash died halfway through (under Windows), and left the firmware in a bad state of being partially-written. I guess it had a built-in recovery system, looking for the bootable floppy with auto-flash (non-interactive) features, and so it was purely by the grace of the BIOS Gods that I was able to get it working again.:)Of course, back in the late 90s, there were a few times when all that got screwed up was the MBR, which in modern parlance would be (for the average user) the equivalent of b

The phrase "brick" is so overused as to be meaningless these days. It wasn't "bricked"; the firmware update got fubared on the hacked phones the last time it was updated, rendering the device non-functional. This one overwrites whatever chunk of firmware code that was causing the issue, and poof, it fixes the problem.

Same as if you screwed up a BIOS update on your motherboard. Do it again, correctly and you'll be fine.

That's a rather bad analogy, since if you screw up a BIOS update on a motherboard and

Depending on the motherboard, there may be emergency provisions in place that don't require you to resort to an EEPROM programmer (I think your forgot an E;) )For instance, some will check for presence of a floppy and burn that to bios.Some motherboards have dual BIOS so you can switch over if one gets screwed up.If you've installed a BIOS Savior (I did on one of my previous machines) then you can use it until you boot up, then reflash your other bios.Some will check for a PCI graphics card and use that to

Same as if you screwed up a BIOS update on your motherboard. Do it again, correctly and you'll be fine.

But that's the thing - if you can do it again correctly, then it wasn't bricked to begin with. Most of the time, if you screw up a BIOS update on your motherboard, you'll wind up with a computer you can't boot sufficiently to run the BIOS updater. That's what "bricking" means.

And every time that information moves around it's being "downloaded". Getting something from the internet: it gets downloaded. Installing software from a CD: downloading.. sending an email: download it to the internet."download" is the universal word for data transfer for the technologically inept.

We have words for these things people: install, copy, upload, send. Learn the lingo or get off the computer.

Why do we have this "it's fun to waste shit" culture? That phone could have been used for years. Instead he stuck it in a blender and set it on fire. Now all the bad stuff in the battery is released into the atmosphere or a landfill somewhere, and all those chemical processes required to manufacture that thing are for nothing.

There's bricked, and then there's bricked. The colloquial meaning for "bricked" simply means that the device is inoperable, and nothing that commonly available consumer tools could do can restore it to working order. Proprietary and undocumented systems can often be bricked in this sense, since the method needed to restore functionality is not known by the public. In this sense the device IS as good as an actual hardware bricking.

I would say that your example doesn't constitute a bricking, since the computer was able to be recovered and put back in a workable state without specialized tools (no, knowing what jumpers to short and how to use a floppy disk don't qualify as "specialized"). If, however, the only way to reset it is by pulling the BIOS chip and reprogramming the EEPROM, then I would consider it bricked. There is a very distinct difference between the two.

If you can recover a device to a full operational state without opening its case or attaching a jTag cable, it wasn't bricked.

Informing the Slashdot community on what "bricked" means is futile. Most Slashdot folks are wannabee computer experts who claim that they are god's gift to computer science and/or information technology.

I think you should just blindly agree with the statement that "iPhones are often bricked when pursuing your constitutional rights due to Job's stupidity and/or evilness" and move directly onto the viability of flying cars and the IP issues of the Crackberry.

They shouldn't be held liable. You buy a product and modify it the manufacture can't, and shouldn't, be held responsible for the results.

No, Apple shouldn't be held liable, but they *should* be strongly condemned for locking it down in the first place and forcing people to resort to these measure so as to have true ownership of THEIR (not Steve's) hardware.

That makes no sense. If you want to put your own thing on their, fine. But don't change it, and then try to update it assuming Apples knows what you changed.Don't put Apple software on it if you don't want Apple software.

What freaks me out is the attitude that first we go out and change undocumented things on the iPhone, and second we go for the Apple-supplied firmware update. Either choice sounds reasonable to me, but both at once is foolhardy.

Unless they make a determined effort to render the product unusable as a form of retribution or punishment. For instance, you take your automobile to the dealership. They see it has a non-factory radio unit or non-factory wheels and tires. They may not deliberately damage the engine, rendering the vehicle useless.Of course the burden would fall upon the owner of the damaged phone to prove in court that Apple set out to render the hacked iPhones inoperative, but that's what discovery is all about.

They can't be held liable, because they can't support a different product than the one they sold. If you break your car yourself, why should the carmaker be held liable.BUT: Apple knew that a lot of people used a specific hack on the phone to "unlock" it. And while testing they found out that their upgrade would "brick" those phones.They could have changed the upgrade so it wouldn't "brick" the unlocked phones, but they chose not to. Now they were even able to "unbrick" those phones.

To me this looks more like a plan. Apple wanted to communicate to their users: "Only use our products as we intended or we will simply break them." And now that the users got the message they play good cop and "unbrick" them for the users, so that the now "good" users will keep on purchasing Apple products, but will never try to use them in any way other than the intended one again.

Funny, it seems to me, that it's an example of Apple fixing phones that third-party unlocking (not unjailing, installation of other apps, but unlocking - modifying the firmware of the cellphone section of the iPhone) caused. The 1.1.2 firmware changed how the OS interacted with the radio - the 1.1.3 firmware made it so phones that worked on 1.1.1 but stopped working on 1.1.2, would now work in 1.1.3. In other words, they _fixed_ those phones, despite having no compelling reason to do that. Yet people

If you look at http://www.hackint0sh.org/ [hackint0sh.org] (forums for the anysim iPhone unlock method), you'll see that some iBricks don't get fixed using this trick. So while this method may work for some, it isn't the cure all for all iPhone hacking mistakes.

I bricked about this happening to "meme" [slashdot.org] a couple years ago, then bricked the solution, [slashdot.org] so I'd like to brick some words of encouragement to anyone who feels bricked by the loss: brick your vengeance. If you can't brick "brick," then nobody can.

Heretofore, "to brick" can brick anything. You can brick a beer; you can brick a pizza. You can brick a computer; and you can brick your girlfriend. You can brick your hat, except in Soviet Russia, where hat bricks you.

Go brick something, and then brick somebody about it in the hopes that they'll brick someone else. Brick the word, so the whole world will brick that they bricked "brick." Hopefully after that, maybe they will have bricked that some words are better off left unbricked.

Do you pronounce 'Knight' with a hard K? how about Knife? I mean thats the way the where pronounce years ago.The common use definition has changed. You can be the biggest ass you want, but it still won't stop the common use of 'Brick' use in this context.

You want to get pendantic? it's not bricked at all.a brick is:
a block of clay hardened by drying in the sun or burning in a kiln,

Save yourself some frustration and realizer the term brick changed when it hit the mainstream market.Like 'Hacker'. You can't stop it, just sigh and go on, otherwise your just screaming into the wind.

What you said is true when talking to the general public. But with how these "bricked" articles keep popping up, one can only assume that the slashdot editors are TRYING to piss off it's readers (perhaps to get more comments and indirectly more ad revenue.) When talking to other specialists about their specialty, you don't go around purposely misusing words. I'm looking at you slashdot, home of news for nerds, stuff that matters. Commander Taco and company might just have some atomic wedgies in their n

Any company that installs firmware on a system in an unknown state "unintentionally" are morons. They've never heard of checksums? Don't trust your expensive iphone to them for updates because they're obviously not performing due diligence. I they can't detect a hacked phone before blindly installing, they will be unable to detect other problems/conditions which would break the phone when patched. As a matter of fact, were there not alsoa small number of non-hacked phones which got bricked as well?

The undercurrent to the entire iPhone story is that the development team has been in a huge rush for months. I think this is fairly obvious to anyone who experienced the 1.0 firmware -- Safari would load an average of 10-20 pages per crash, there was some serious weirdness with the battery charge indicator, and I'm sure that many of the reports of dropped calls or whatever were in fact serious software problems. Honestly, I haven't seen an OS so flaky since RedHat 5.0. Besides that, major features that w

There was no reason to check the state of the phone before making the patch that bricked it. The previous baseband was the only baseband in production models, they KNEW what state the baseband should be in because there was only one released.
Along come the hacks that modify the baseband. Apple then does patchs to the baseband eeprom. They only change the bytes that need changed, not overwrite the entire baseband. Anyone now has used the hack and then updated now has a corrupted baseband and a phone th

Yes there is. Presuming the firmware is in pristine state is a bad assumption. The firmware could have been corrupted by damage, defect, or malware, and of course intentional modification. Verifying the firmware checksum is correct is the RIGHT thing to do. When it tells you (hopefully) that it can't install and there is a problem with your iPhone, you can call in and get it checked out if you did not modify it. This way a defective/infected iPhone is fixed and not bricked. THAT is a way to build customer l

Any company that installs firmware on a system in an unknown state "unintentionally" are morons.

Or perhaps they just trust their customers not to be morons? After all, what would you call somebody who installs an update on a modified phone in defiance of a prominent warning IN ALL CAPS that the update will damage modified phones? And then complains about it when that happens?

Crap! I managed to brick my iPhone into a firewall. But I didn't think that Windows CE-ME-NT would dry so quickly all over it! Seriously, the 2000 grade formula drys in XP amount of time.
Please, feel free to brick me now with your brick iPhone that I know you think are now just useless bricks now. Mwa ha ha ha ha. Score.

This isn't flamebait, I'm just saying this scared me away from buying an iPhone

This isn't flamebait either, I'm just confused at your statement. The fact that Apple does not support hardware when the warranty has been intentionally voided scared you away? Or the fact that you are locked-in to AT&T with the iPhone?

I assume you mean Apple ATT.First off, customers don't have to accept it.

Second, Apple arranged this partnership so they could get the concessions THEY needed from the phone company, namely for Visual Voicemail. So there's a good reason for a consumer to WANT to accept it -- added functionality. Now you can argue that visual voicemail was a pointless feature and just a cover for Apple being greedy and wanting a share of the profits. I'm just telling you there IS a reason.

I agree with you, but here's why I'm posting. I never thought I'd side with Apple's choice of lock-in vs. open, especially with all of the AT&T evil. Now I say this as someone who waited for an iPhone and decided to cancel AT&T instead.But when I look at things dispassionately, per your inspiration, it becomes obvious to me that this was an insanely smart play on their part. Because of evil, emotional lock-in? No, because of risk management.

Oh and this isn't bundling. If you modify a sharp zaruas and it stops working completely youu don't go back to sharp to get it fixed. If you flashed your nokia to hack it to add features that wasn't there before Nokia won't support your phone anymore.

stop singling out apple when ever other company does the exact same friggin thing you friggin idiot.

However, what if someone built a hydrogen car that got 100x the milage of gas cars, and partnered with the only chain of hydrogen stations there were. Would you still refuse to use it? Or instead would you support a better idea in cars?

No you don't the $20 is for software that will turn the iPod touch into a PDA. Including mail client etc, that should have been included from the start.

Since the iPod touch is an iPod, and not a PDA, and since those features were not there to begin with and everybody who bought one knew that if they bothered to to do any research first, isn't $20 a small price to pay to add those features if you want them? Are you forced to spend the $20? Did Apple claim those features were there to begin with and then charge people $20 to get them?

WRONG. Punishing early adopters would be if Apple started adding these apps to NEW Touches, and NOT offering an upgrade to existing Touch owners at all.What happens when you buy a computer with Windows XP and then Vista comes out and you want the computer to have that instead? You have to pay to upgrade it, that's what. Even if its the same hardware... costing the SAME price (or less).

Yes, it'd be very cool if manufacturers just doled out free software/feature updates for everyone in perpetuity... but that

Until this firmware update was released, the bricked phones were "irrevocably" useless. [emphasis mine]

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Seriously, nothing indicates that these users updated the firmware by any abnormal method. The phone would be bricked if there were no way to get into recovery mode or whatever lets you update the firmware.

whatever sort of recovery mode these phones could go into was of no use without the existence of the new firmware. Phones with no ability other than to potentially install future software yet to be written are exactly as useful as a brick, hence the correct usage of the term 'bricked' to describe them. With no means in existence to revoke the changes, the phones were (at the time) irrevocably bricked. If your definition of irrevocable extends to all concievable future technological breakthroughs, then it's

This wasn't some magical unforseen technology, like a flux capacitor that allowed users to go back in time and prevent themselves from unlocking the phones, it was some software to run on the device, which was apparently perfectly capable of installing and running whatever you gave it. It was obvious from the initial reports that the problem was not irreversible. So, again, "(at the time) irrevocably"?? In response to that Princess Bride quote?

Apple's continued stance that they know what's best for their customers and that their products are 'perfect' as-is prevents what could be revolutionary products from ever reaching that potential.

Um, WTF are you talking about?

That they disavow any damage a firmware update will do to a modified piece of hardware? If that is the case, I would submit that 99.9% of companies are in the exact same class.

If you are talking about the fact that an SDK is not out yet, wait a month til it is.

If you are just turned off by Steve Jobs, that seems like a personal issue.

but so long as they keep the snotty outlook on the world at large, they're just another tech company. Apple, you need to stop acting like assholes, and stop treating your customers like every last one is a worthless idiot.

What are you *so* bitter about? I really don't understand this somewhat prevalent attitude that because they aren't supporting an unsupported

They can innovate to extraordinary levels in many ways, but so long as they keep the snotty outlook on the world at large, they're just another tech company. Apple, you need to stop acting like assholes, and stop treating your customers like every last one is a worthless idiot.

Yeah! How dare they release a $20 upgrade to an MP3 player that turns it into a wifi-connected PDA! What jerks those guys are! The nerve of them! To show how big of jerks they are, they even went further and added those features to the new ones, for free! Someone should do something about this!

Dude, if you were wanting a bargain product, Apple simply isn't making anything for you.

If you want a really nice product, particularly aesthetically nice, then Apple makes all kinds of shit you might like. But you have to give them MONEY for it.

That software was not advertised as included in the ipod touch. So you didn't get screwed. If you want this version of the software, pay 20$. Of course, a lot of people get it through a different avenue.

If you want a cheap PDA that has a lot of this functionality, you can get one pretty cheap. If $20 is a big deal for you.

Apple is going to always do this. They've found a niche that is profitable, has decent clientele, is fun to manage. I think Apple isn't going to change. They will charge you more for everything, but make good stuff.